David Livingstone Smith QUOTES

1 " Rather than looking for explanations for why all people deserve to be treated with compassion and respect, we ought to be working at creating a world in which people are treated with compassion and respect. Human rights aren’t lying around waiting to be discovered. They’re made, not found. "

― David Livingstone Smith , Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others

2 " Dehumanization isn’t a way of talking. It’s a way of thinking—a way of thinking that, sadly, comes all too easily to us. Dehumanization is a scourge, and has been so for millennia. It acts as a psychological lubricant, dissolving our inhibitions and inflaming our destructive passions. As such, it empowers us to perform acts that would, under other circumstances, be unthinkable. "

― David Livingstone Smith , Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others

3 " The practice of explicitly describing others as less than humans is nowadays often frowned upon and is widely condemned. So propagandists who cultivate dehumanizing attitudes most often do this indirectly. Rather than overtly referring to a group of people as animals or monsters, they describe them in ways that invoke this image in the minds of their listeners.
There are certain themes that reappear over and over in this dehumanizing discourse.

The common one is criminality. The dehumanized group is made to appear inherently threatening and their criminality is represented as crudely animalistic typically involving rape and murder.

Another common theme is parasitism. The dehumanized group conspires to exploit the majority sucking the blood out of decent, hard-working people and claiming privileges that they haven't earned.

Images of filth and disease are also very frequent. Dehumanised groups are vectors of infection, they are dirty and contaminating. They are often thought of as invaders, outsiders who are taking us over. They are reproducing at an alarming rate and they will soon outnumber us unless we do something about it. "

― David Livingstone Smith , On Inhumanity: Dehumanization and How to Resist It

4 " The spread of ideologies should be seen as something akin to cognitive epidemics. "

― David Livingstone Smith , On Inhumanity: Dehumanization and How to Resist It

5 " Like religion, politics traffics in and plays upon our deepest hopes and fears. And like religion, authoritharian political propaganda works by first making us feel endangered and then offering us a way to escape form our feelings of helplessness. "

― David Livingstone Smith , On Inhumanity: Dehumanization and How to Resist It

6 " It's through media that dehumanizing ideas are spread and reproduced. That's why totalitarians out a premium on destroying freedom of the press. "

― David Livingstone Smith , On Inhumanity: Dehumanization and How to Resist It

7 " It's through media that dehumanizing ideas are spread and reproduced. That's why totalitarians puts a premium on destroying freedom of the press. "

― David Livingstone Smith , On Inhumanity: Dehumanization and How to Resist It

8 " Before dehumanizing a population, we set them apart as a "race." That is, a variety of people who are fundamentally different from "us." The folk notion of race is very much an artificial construction. "

― David Livingstone Smith , Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others

9 " Social psychologists confirm that we are likely to perceive people outside our own community as more alike than those within it. We perceive members of our own group as individuals, but see other groups as more or less homogenous (psychologists call this the “outgroup homogeneity bias”). "

― David Livingstone Smith , Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others

10 " To perceive others as fully human means to be saddened by the death of every single person, regardless of the population, group, or part of the world from which he comes, and regardless of our own personal acquaintance with him. If we accord him identity, then we must individualize his death [and] … if we accord him community, then we must experience his death as a personal loss. "

― David Livingstone Smith , Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others

11 " Terrorism" is a word with little content - it is a label for brutalities committed by "the enemy", and from which one's own acts of destruction are exempted. It is an inchoate and emotionally laden concept, a semantic mirror of our dishonesty and a repository for everything about war that we would like to disavow. Making a sharp distinction between war and terrorism is at best a self-deceptive game. "

― David Livingstone Smith , The Most Dangerous Animal: Human Nature and the Origins of War

12 " Self-deception is an indispensable element of war, and that despite the fact that wars are calculated and planned, there is a sense in which human beings do not know what they are doing when they cut one another down on the battlefield. "

― David Livingstone Smith , The Most Dangerous Animal: Human Nature and the Origins of War

13 " We find human faces in the moon, armies in the clouds; and by a natural propensity, if not corrected by experience and reflection, ascribe malice or good-will to every thing, that hurts or pleases us. Hence … in poetry … trees, mountains, and streams are personified, and the inanimate parts of nature acquire sentiment and passion. "

― David Livingstone Smith , Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others

14 " Speech was given to man to disguise his thoughts. —Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand "

― David Livingstone Smith , Why We Lie: The Evolutionary Roots of Deception and the Unconscious Mind

15 " Sometimes the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are presented as a hunting expeditions (“As British close in on Basra, Iraqis scurry away”; “Terror hunt snares twenty-five”; and “Net closes around Bin Laden”) with enemy bases as animal nests (“Pakistanis give up on lair of Osama”; “Terror nest in Fallujah is attacked”) from which the prey must be driven out (“Why Bin Laden is so difficult to smoke out”; “America’s new dilemma: how to smoke Bin Laden out from caves”). We need to trap the animal (“Trap may net Taliban chief”; “FBI terror sting nets mosque leaders”) and lock it in a cage (“Even locked in a cage, Saddam poses serious danger”). Sometimes the enemy is a ravening predator (“Chained beast—shackled Saddam dragged to court”), or a monster (“The terrorism monster”; “Of monsters and Muslims”), while at other times he is a pesky rodent (“Americans cleared out rat’s nest in Afghanistan”; “Hussein’s rat hole”), a venomous snake (“The viper awaits”; “Former Arab power is ‘poisonous snake’”), an insect (“Iraqi forces find ‘hornet’s nest’ in Fallujah”; “Operation desert pest”; “Terrorists, like rats and cockroaches, skulk in the dark”), or even a disease organism (“Al Qaeda mutating like a virus”; “Only Muslim leaders can remove spreading cancer of Islamic terrorism”). In any case, they reproduce at an alarming rate (“Iraq breeding suicide killers”; “Continent a breeding ground for radical Islam”). "

― David Livingstone Smith , Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others

16 " The universe is made of stories, not atoms. "

― David Livingstone Smith , Why We Lie: The Evolutionary Roots of Deception and the Unconscious Mind

17 " Note that having a large brain is biologically costly: the brain is an expensive organ to run, and large ones consume many precious calories (the human brain accounts for a whopping 20 percent of our energy expenditure). "

― David Livingstone Smith , Why We Lie: The Evolutionary Roots of Deception and the Unconscious Mind

18 " A poll of U.S. servicemen indicated that 44 percent would like to kill a Japanese soldier while only 6 percent felt the same way about Germans. "

― David Livingstone Smith , Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others

19 " Three years earlier, when the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in Iraq became public, Rush Limbaugh—the most popular radio broadcaster in the United States, whose syndicated radio show has, at last count, 13 million listeners—described the prisoners who had been killed, raped, tortured, and humiliated by or at the behest of U.S. military personnel, as less than human. “They are the ones who are sick,” fumed Limbaugh. "

― David Livingstone Smith , Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others

20 " Mark a hen’s comb with an oddly colored spot, or tie it so it hangs in a peculiar direction, and her former flock mates will attack her mercilessly. Jane Goodall, who was the first scientist to observe chimpanzees up close and personal in the wild, noticed that crippled chimpanzees were rejected and attacked by apes that were previously on friendly terms with them. "

― David Livingstone Smith , Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others